PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
The Department of Health arranged to book for a year a hospital in Redhill, Surrey, run by Bupa, to allow 5,000 operations to be completed. Mr Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said in Parliament earlier that Britain would increase spending on health to the European average by 2005. But within four days he told the Independent on Sunday: 'I am not deciding spending levels now. I am saying in broad terms what I said previously.' Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that he would resist an extra tax that was hypothecated to spending on health. Mr lain Duncan Smith visited Washington, where, in a 45-minute meeting with President George Bush, he supported firm action against Iraq: he then went to Stockholm to see how it ran its hospitals. Mrs Elizabeth Filkin announced that she would by no means reapply for her post as parliamentary standards commissioner; in a wrathful letter that was made public she told of how politicians, some senior, had obstructed her work and persecuted her. Church of England and Roman Catholic primary schools, which make up 30 per cent of the total, were found to account for 60 per cent of those that achieved a perfect score in this year's national curriculum tests. Foreign drug-smugglers jailed in Britain may be deported before their sentence ends in order to ease pressure on prisons which
now hold 68,300. George Harrison, the former Beatle, died, aged 58. An 80-year-old woman in a nursing home died and five others became seriously ill after drinking what they took for a blackcurrant drink that turned out to be dishwasher rinsing fluid. The government said it was giving local authorities an extra £6 million to help pay for the disposal of old refrigerators, which from I January will be classified by the European Union as 'hazardous waste'.
PALESTINIAN suicide bombers killed 25 Israelis in a 12-hour period. Just before midnight last Saturday, two suicide bombers set off nail-filled bombs on Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda street, packed with young Israelis, killing ten, mostly teenagers, and wounding 150. At noon on Sunday. another Palestinian blew himself up in a bus in Haifa, killing 15 and injuring 40. In response Israeli helicopter gunships and warplanes destroyed helicopters and a hangar at the headquarters in Gaza of Yasser Arafat. the President of the Palestinian Authority, and hit other Palestinian buildings in the West Bank. 'Arafat is responsible for everything that is happening here,' said Mr Arid l Sharon. the Israeli Prime Minister. 'Arafat has made his strategic choice, a strategy of terrorism.' During the past 14 months of violence more than 230 Israelis and more than 780 Pales tinians have been killed. The United States froze the assets of organisations in America that it said had links with Hamas. Different groups of Afghans spent days in talks in Bonn to choose an interim administration for the country. Meanwhile American forces attacked underground tunnels at Tora Bora in southern Afghanistan, 50 miles from Jalalabad, which were said to have been used by al-Oa'eda, possibly by Osama bin Laden himself; dozens of civilians were said by Taleban sources to have died. Mr Rauf Denktash, the leader of the Turkish Cypriots, met President Glafcos Clerides of the larger, Greek-speaking part of Cyprus, which was split in 1974. In Taiwan the Democratic Progressive party, which favours independence from China, won elections, defeating the Nationalist party (the KMT), which had been in power for 52 years. Crown Princess Masako of Japan, aged 37, after eight years of marriage gave birth to her first child, a daughter; only males can succeed to the throne. Argentina prohibited its citizens from withdrawing from banks more than 250 US dollars' worth of cash a week. The Bank of Ireland obtained a court order in Spain freezing the account of a Dublin man to whom they accidentally gave a quarter of a million Irish pounds by mistaking euros for pesetas, CSH
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